Nelson Hultberg's blog

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

In 1919, Rudyard Kipling wrote in The Gods of the Copybook Headings, "As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man / That...the Sow returns to her Mire / And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire."

Likewise, it appears that conservatives return to their disastrous past policies. In outlining his foreign policy plans for America, Jeb Bush recently stated, "I love my father and my brother...But I am my own man – and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences." He went on to say, "I won't talk about the past. I'll talk about the future."

What does this mean in actual foreign policy goals and actions? As reported by Chris Stirewalt at Fox News, the foreign policy team being formed by Jeb Bush "is not just very much George W. Bush's, but includes two of the most controversial figures from [the] invasion of Iraq, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Short of including Dick Cheney, this is the strongest possible indication that Bush is embracing his brother's foreign policy."

"Feels like old times," reports Stierwalt. "Other core players from the George W. Bush administration on the team include former Homeland Security secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, former intelligence bosses Porter Goss, John Negroponte and Michael Hayden."

How many conservatives, other than Jeb Bush, are also of this mindset? How many are itching to get bogged down again in the Mideast cauldron with ground troops taking on ISIS? John Kasich of Ohio, for one, states in the Washington Post that he supports sending U.S. ground forces to fight the Islamic State: "You will not solve this problem with only air power." Will Chris Christie be strong enough to reject such herd thinking? Hardly. He's the personification of an establishment sycophant.

Paul, Cruz, and Walker

Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Scott Walker will surely not stand for this myopic rehash of Bush Doctrine interventionism. But neocons control the GOP both ideologically and financially. To become the nominee, a candidate must acquiesce to the neoconservative worldview. This is why all prospective nominees (even Paul, Cruz, and Walker), when discussing the illegal immigration problem, state that they support "opening up a path to citizenship" for the illegals. What else is this but amnesty for over 20 million illegals? What else is this but acquiescence to the neocon controllers of the party? Prospective nominees realize that such a stand is mandatory if they are to win the nomination of a party controlled by "pro-amnesty" neocons. Will the same acquiescent attitude also govern Paul, Cruz, and Walker on foreign policy?

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

There is only one hope to stop the tyrannical rot of statism stealing over our country. We must challenge the Democrat-Republican monopoly of politics that
foments the rot.

Is this being redundant? Heard all this before? Perhaps, but our most defiant Founding Father, Samuel Adams, was very redundant in his pursuit of justice.
He told his fellows repeatedly: “It does not take a majority to prevail…but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in
the minds of men.” Irate and tireless are what’s important here. We can save our country only if we patriots (who are the minority) relentlessly challenge
the Democrat-Republican monopoly and the egregious falsity it spews out every election year.

Our Democrat-Republican politicians are not interested in freedom. They're interested in power and riding around in black limousines. Conservatives and
libertarians must break from them totally and join with millions of patriotic independents and blue-collar Democrats to form a new governing coalition.

Never can we hear too much of this message of American salvation. The Democrat-Republican monopoly is like the Bolsehviks’ Master Party collectivizing us
with its regimentation (only done with ballots rather than bullets, subsidies rather than gulags), but always degrading our lives in so many ways, keeping
us from what could be and ought to be. So if redundancy is the price we must pay to rouse the people from their stupor, so be it.

But the People Just Don’t Care!

The most frequent objection encountered in discussing a challenge of the Democrat- Republican monopoly is that it will be impossible for an alternative
political party to win at the polls because the people just don't care enough to do something so revolutionary. They are mesmerized by their SUVs
and all the goodies that Consumerland has brought them. Voting will not change things because the voters are already bought and paid for with the bread and
circuses government perpetually sends their way. Apathy dominates their lives.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

Directed by Kari Skogland; written by Stephen David and David C. White.

The History channel’s new miniseries, Sons of Liberty, will anger the purists and the prudes. But it will delight the swashbuckler in the rest of us. It is a big, bodacious screening with superb production values that covers the lead-up years to the American Revolution, 1765-1775. Yes, certain liberties are taken with some of the facts and events. The main characters are glamorized. But the essential theme of America’s birth is kept intact: we as a nation were spawned by a band of rebels made up of assorted firebrands, smugglers, and philosophers all coalescing together under the rubric of Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.” Besides, what depiction of history is not romanticized by making the main characters a bit handsomer and younger than they, perhaps, were. Certainly not any depiction made for television.

The main character striding through Sons of Liberty is the famous Samuel Adams, played robustly by British actor, Ben Barnes, who doesn’t give us an actualization of Adams’ role in history, but rather a symbolization of it. First of all, Barnes is in his early thirties, and Adams was 51 years old when he fomented the Boston Tea Party. So the producers of Sons of Liberty are trying to give us the symbolic Sam Adams and what his role was in the creation of America. Sam Adams was the quintessential rebel mind. He didn’t have the scholarly genius of Thomas Jefferson, but he had a brilliant revolutionary mind. And valor permeated his entire life. He blended mind and defiance as well as, and perhaps better than, any of our Founders.

Sam Adams told his fellow patriots in 1773 in the build-up to the Boston Tea Party, “It does not take a majority to prevail…but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

This is what brings about all revolutionary change in history – small minorities of men and women fervently committed to a cause that will require courage and resourcefulness to bring into fruition. Yes, luck is also necessary, but mostly courage and resourcefulness because luck eventually descends upon us all. It’s the ones with courage who ride the luck into history and change the fate of mankind. Sam Adams and the “Sons of Liberty” were these kind of men. They seized the opportunity that the arrogant, blundering British gave to them.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

One of the biggest fallacies in politics today is the claim that we, as conservatives and libertarians, can only be effective if we stay loyal to the
Republican Party and work to gain control of it by electing more free-market conservatives every election year.

We at AFR believe such thinking to be tragically misguided. To expect the Republican Party to challenge the modern day juggernaut of statism is as foolish
as expecting socialist professors to instill Americanism into our youth. It won’t happen anymore than the planets will one day reverse their orbits. This
is because the members of the GOP hierarchy who control the party have bought into the collectivist ideologies of Karl Marx and J.M. Keynes. Thus they want
the same thing that Democrats want – a society in which “equality of results” replaces “equality of rights.” They merely want it to be established more
gradually than do the Democrats.

Conservatives have been trying to take over the GOP for more than 40 years now by electing “conservative legislators” to Congress; yet nothing has changed.
The Republican Party continues to give us relentlessly expanding government. It continues to exploit, lie to, and make fools out of conservatives.

Those who continue to cling to the hope that they can transform the Republican Party into an engine of freedom are like battered wives who continue to
stick around to take their husbands abusive beatings. The marriage is over. Conservatives, libertarians, and patriots must abandon the GOP.

The GOP Hierarchy

The problem with the conservative strategy is that electing conservative legislators to Congress can never bring about a takeover of the party because the
GOP hierarchy buys off 90 percent of the legislators that we send. Who and what is this GOP hierarchy? It is the vast network of elite intellectuals,
bankers, and corporate leaders throughout America that make up the “neoconservative establishment.”

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

Reason flees; pygmies rule. Our intellectuals and legislators on both sides of the spectrum have abandoned all sanity regarding immigration, culture,
freedom, and common sense. Our country is in free fall. Collapse lies over the horizon like grinning Death with its blood stained Scythe. Pity our
children. They must live in the desolate country we are creating for them.

Those who hold intellectual and legislative power in America today, no doubt, think of themselves as noble and brave in pursuit of justice and progressive
purpose to advance the values of our great nation. They imagine that they are doing the “people’s will.” They please themselves in front of the morning
mirror thinking that the world’s a better place because of their presence and acumen. But it is a cunning lie.

The highest of our leaders, our President, has just come in front of us to set in motion a leprosy of executive actions that must tear down our safety,
stability, and legitimacy as a culture. He has inserted a Trojan Horse of deception and perfidy into our society that puts him on the path of history’s
mega-tyrants. Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, and Robespierre may have been far more ruthless and blatant, but the lawless policies of Barack Obama are huge
steps toward dictatorship, and will prove to be, in the long run, lethal to the decency and freedom that a just society is built upon. We are being
assailed with the tyranny of the velvet glove rather than the iron fist; and those who man the media desks and the schools of America cannot grasp the
subtle hideousness of it.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

Many in America’s freedom movement still hope that the Libertarian Party will one day become a power on the political scene to challenge the
Democrat-Republican monolith. But in 42 years it hasn’t happened, and it probably won’t happen. There are some very distinct reasons why the LP and all
other alternative / independent parties fail. This essay will examine them.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

It signals the death knell of the Democrat-Republican monolith's control over our political system. It shows how to put forth a challenge in 2016 that will far exceed Ross Perot's campaign in 1992 - a true freedom challenge that will rock the nation and make history.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

The essential economic problem we confront today is that our dominant Keynesian intellectuals have abandoned reality. They do not grasp what they have
wrought with the mountainous loads of debt and malinvestment that are overwhelming us. Much of this burden must be liquidated before genuine demand and
growth can be restored, which will require radical reform if we are to evoke a genuine cure.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

It began in the early 1940s. FDR had launched the New Deal’s collectivization of America, and a small but prescient group of libertarian and conservative intellectuals were in rebellion – such thinkers as Richard Weaver, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, John T. Flynn, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand, to be followed a decade later by the likes of Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, and Murray Rothbard.

Out of their cerebral and activist efforts there began the movement to repeal the overweening statism that was infiltrating America from Europe via Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. The infamous year of 1913 was the infiltration’s major manifestation. FDR’s New Deal was its Rubicon. In reaction to the radical political changes taking place during the 1913-1940 era, today’s freedom movement was born.

It is not well-known by the general public, but when the modern freedom movement first began in the early 1940s, it was not split between libertarians and conservatives. It was one coalition unified in rebellion against FDR’s monster welfare state. By 1970, however, the movement had become tragically bifurcated. The radical economist Murray Rothbard took libertarians off into anarchy, while the traditionalist philosopher Russell Kirk drove conservatives into statism. This split has created two incomplete visions – contemporary libertarianism and conservatism – that are, in their singularity, incapable of effectively challenging the authoritarian mega-state.

Conservatives are caught up in the puritanical swamps of legislating morality and hegemonic conquest of the world, while libertarians chase the philosophical absurdities of moral subjectivism and ersatz individualism. Conservatives wish to return to the Middle Ages and mandate morality via the state, while Libertarians wish to do away with any reference to morality altogether. Conservatives revere leaders like Savonarola and John Calvin. Libertarians excite themselves with Larry Flynt and the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man.” Somewhere the Founding Fathers are twisting in their graves over each of these political movements and their embarrassing lack of comprehension concerning the requisites for a free and individualist society.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

It is believed by many on the left today that our Constitution resulted from the Founding Fathers deceitfully conspiring to form a society ruled by aristocrats, and that the seeds for modernity’s corruption lie in the Founders’ elitist Constitution that now plagues us. This is why it is so easy for today’s liberals to ignore the Constitution with no qualms or regrets. They feel it is their duty to do so.

Conservatives and libertarians see things differently. It was not the Founders in the beginning who warped the ideal of justice with “elitism.” It was the Progressives of the early twentieth century who did the warping with “egalitarianism.” And it has been modern day liberals who have furthered this tyrannical leveling of society. Worse, it has been our greed and shortsightedness as a people that have compelled us to complicity with such criminality.

The intent of the Founders was to provide a document that would keep the growth of government under wraps for all of time. Unfortunately, there were flaws in their document that should not have been included, but it was not because of deceit. It was because of their desire to get all 13 colonies to sign on to it.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

It is now five years since the crash of 2008. Today's media and much of our academic crowd, of course, believe that the crisis has been handled, and that we can settle back to "business as usual."

But such pundits are so immersed in the Keynesian paradigm that they are viewing only the trees, not the forest. They are viewing only the specific recessionary cycles and not connecting such cycles to the big picture of the overall boom / bust nature of 20th century economics. Since they have accepted Keynesianism as valid, they see in today's economy normal activity and business cycles. They see correct Federal Reserve policy and legitimate fiscal policy on the part of the Federal Government. But this view comes from a false concept of economics and from a major failing of humans – their use of "euphemism" to evade the fact they are trying to circumvent natural law so as to get something for nothing.

For example, almost all of today's scholars and pundits use the term "liquidity" to describe what the Federal Reserve injects into the economy to manage it. Tune into CNBC or Fox Business on any given day, and you will hear repeatedly about how the Fed needs to "inject liquidity" into the system.

But if we do not use euphemism in this discussion and call "liquidity" what it actually is, then we get a considerably different picture about what the Fed is doing. The Fed is not injecting "liquidity" into the system when it performs its FOMC functions. It is injecting "credit" into the system. But what is credit? Simply another word for DEBT. So this is what the Fed is injecting into our economy when it performs its Keynesian mandated functions. It is injecting massive DEBT into the system, which means it is enticing Americans to go substantially in debt to live their lives and likewise with the government to perform its functions.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers have recently introduced legislation to allow for the sale of raw milk, i.e., unpasteurized milk. Their Milk Freedom Act of 2014 would make it legal for “certified dairy farmers” to sell unpasteurized milk products without harassment and criminal prosecution on the part of the FDA. If enacted, this would be a major victory for those who are health conscious and understand the grievous misperception by our medical establishment regarding the safety of raw milk.

The distribution of raw milk has been banned in the U.S. since inception of the pasteurization laws in the 1920s. The American Medical Association together with the FDA brought about this ban of raw milk because of its susceptibility to being a carrier for certain infectious microbes such as salmonella.

The error here is that it was never “raw milk” that was a problem. It was “warm raw milk” produced in crowded, unsanitary conditions from grain-fed cows instead of grass-fed that was prone to an unhealthy level of microbes. Grass-fed cows produce a milk with natural “inhibins,” anti-microbial agents that keep pathogens low, while grain-fed cows do not produce high “inhibin” levels in their milk.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

Libertarians and free-market conservatives take an unequivocal stand on the provision of state welfare. It should be phased out and returned to the private sector. Charity is not a proper function of government.

This, of course, attracts the usual horrified denunciations of, "My God, what kind of human being are you? Don't you have any compassion? How can you wish to suppress poor people so? We can't just let people be poor; we must do something!"

But to be against state funded welfare does not mean one is devoid of compassion or desirous of suppressing poor people. It means one is against the dispensing of special privi­leges from the government to the citizens of a country, which means that the help we give to poor people must be done with our own money and time, and not be confiscated from others to gratify our desires and assuage our guilt. It means that if American citizens are to possess equal rights, then government cannot take money from some and give it to others. To enact such a policy is to convey pri­vileges upon some at the expense of others, which destroys the moral-philosophical foundation of our entire system. So if we are to maintain justice (i.e., equal rights), government must be barred from transferring wealth from some individuals to other individuals. This means that all charity must be private.

The “safety net” for low income earners will still function in a laissez-faire society. What our present day intellectual community refuses to face is that the phasing out of state welfare would not, in any way, eliminate the safety net. It would just transfer the safety net from the ministra­tions of power hungry government bureaucracies to a vast, private sector of concerned and humane persons. There are countless charitable organizations, agencies and groups, of both religious and secular nature, that would capably assume the role of a "welfare safety net" for people in need.

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

One of the major evils of the welfare state in libertarian eyes is that it destroys the concept of objective law (i.e., equal rights under the law) throughout society. This is because the welfare state is based upon the violation of individual rights in order to convey privileges to special interest groups. All primary policies of state welfarism entail such a violation and conveyance. This is why justice can never be achieved under a welfare state philosophy, liberal or conservative.

Government's job is to protect rights, not violate them. It’s laws must be applied equally, which means no privileges. Yet we are taught today that government conveyance of privileges to special interest groups will bring us a just society. It is even taught that our concern with “special interest groups” is the American Way – this in face of the fact that the Founders’ repeatedly warned against the creation of “political factions.”

Special Privilege Defined

What follows will hopefully throw some light on this important issue and clarify how government’s conveyance of special privileges is destroying freedom and justice. Because of the heavy ideological obfuscation that prevails in our media and our schools, we need to first define the term special privilege. It means the intervention of government into the free-market to legislate policy that favors specific individuals and groups over other individuals or groups. It is the enactment of laws that either aid or suppress some people in relation to other people. Special privilege can take any number of forms. For example:

Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared in such publications as the Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, Insight, The Freeman, and Liberty, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense, and Safe Haven. He is also the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: nelshultberg@aol.com

For the first 125 years of our history (1789-1913), America was a country comprised of libertarian politics and conservative cultural values.

1) Libertarian politics is based upon the fact that man was meant to be free. Thus his government must be strictly limited by a Constitution rather than determined by the dictates of an autocrat or the passions of the majority. And his economy must be a free marketplace, i.e., laissez-faire capitalism.

2) Conservative cultural values are based upon the fact that there is an objective moral order in the universe, i.e., certain rights and wrongs in human life that are applicable to all of us for all of time. Man’s culture is to be guided by these objective moral values by instilling them into young people at an early age.

These are the two vital elements that built us into the most desired nation in history – libertarian politics and conservative cultural values. The Founding Founders believed that if political freedom is to avoid degenerating into license and anarchy, we cannot promote different opinions on morality within the same society, i.e., a “do-your-own-thing” moral philosophy.

For example, no rational person would tolerate different opinions on whether six-year olds would make good congressmen in Washington, or whether cyanide is as good a season as salt, or whether the sun and rain are necessary for a farmer's crops. Why then would he tolerate different opinions on what is right and wrong in the moral realms of life? In other words morality is not, as today's pundits insist, relative to the person and the culture. There are fundamental rights and wrongs that can be agreed upon and upheld by all members of society. To do otherwise is to create a culture of chaos and decadence, which is what is being created all around us today.

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